Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

English in origin, the family became Irish and then American. In blood he was doubly removed from England, first by Irish progenitors, then by American, and in his entire make-up, physical and intellectual, he was so absolutely un-English that to the day of his death he was an object of curious observation and wondering comment wherever he went, in even so cosmopolitan a city as London.

There was nothing he loved better than to surprise, mystify, confuse, and confound the stolid Briton. And though he lived most of his life in Chelsea and came back there to spend his last days, he was from the very beginning and remained until the end a stranger in a strange land, a solitary soul in the midst of an uncongenial, unsympathetic, unappreciative, unloving people.

So little does England care for him or his art, or, more truly, so prejudiced is the nation against him as an impertinent interloper, who for more than a generation disturbed the serenity of her art household, that the National Museum has no example of his work. Needless to say, if he had been English, or had come from the remotest of England’s outlying possessions, English paperdom and English officialdom would have claimed him as their own, condoned his eccentricities, and bought his works with liberal hand.

During the days of his greatest poverty and distress, when even France turned stupidly aside from things she soon came to worship, and England was jeering clumsily, and all nations repudiated him,—our own the loudest of all,—he really seemed to be “a man without a country,” and, beyond question, the injustice, the bitterness of it all entered deep into his soul and remained. But whatever the folly, the blindness, the stupidity of a country, though it seek to cast off a child so brilliant he is not understood, the ties remain; however strained, they cannot be broken. Nothing that America can do suffices to make an Englishman or a Frenchman or a German out of an American,—the man himself may take on a foreign veneer, but beneath the surface he belongs where blood and birth have placed him.

He was infinitely more of an American than thousands who live at home and ape the manners of Europe. He came from a line of ancestors so distinctively and aggressively American that he could not have turned out otherwise had he tried.

He was not even an Anglo-American or a Franco-American, but of all the types and races which go to make the American people he was in blood, appearance, alertness, combativeness, wit, and a thousand and one traits, an exceedingly refined illustration of the Irish-American; and because of his Irish blood, with perhaps some Scotch on his mother’s side, he was never in sympathy with anything English, but was now and then somewhat in sympathy with many things French, though the points of sympathetic contact were so slight and superficial that he could not live contentedly for any length of time in Paris. In his art, his convictions, and his conventions he was altogether too profound, too serious, too earnest—one might with truth say, too puritanical—to find the atmosphere of Paris altogether congenial. His great portraits might have come from the studio of a Covenanter, but never from a typical Paris atelier.

The Puritan element which is to be found in every American achievement, whether in war, in art, or in literature, though often deeply hidden, is conspicuous in Whistler’s work, though he himself would probably have been the first to deny it; and it is this element of sobriety, of steadfastness, of undeviating adherence to convictions and ideals that constitutes the firm foundation of his art, of his many brilliant and beautiful superstructures of fancy.

Only a Puritan at heart could have painted the “Carlyle,” “His Mother,” and that wonderful child portrait, “Miss Alexander.”

Only a Puritan at heart could have painted the mystery of night with all his tender, loving, religious sympathy.

Only a Puritan at heart could have exhibited as he did in everything he touched those infinitely precious qualities of reserve, of delicacy, of refinement, which are the conspicuous characteristics of his work.